Generally, online support groups are viewed as low-threshold services. We challenge this assumption with an investigation, based on Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, of contributions to an online support group on eating disorders. In this analysis we show how a new member interacts with existing members in order to display legitimacy for membership of the group. The group operates as a Community of Practice, since membership is organized as joined participation in a writing practice. It becomes clear that becoming a member involves subscribing to normative requirements, centrally, displaying the insight that you are ill. In the case we focus on, this involves the requirement to leave pro-anorexia as a membership category behind. The novice does not yet seem ready to subscribe to this norm and thus the threshold for seeking support is heightened.

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In this article, we present an analysis of closings in two counseling media: online, text-based exchanges (usually referred to as "chat" sessions) and telephone calls. Previous research has found that the participant who initiated a conversation preferably also initiates its termination with a possible preclosing. Advice acknowledgments, lying in the epistemic domain of the client, are devices that may work as preclosings. However, in text-based chat clients regularly refrain from advice acknowledgment. While counselors use various practices to elicit advice acknowledgment in the context of potential advice resistance, hoaxing, and/or seemingly long pauses, these questions do not always succeed as "closing devices." This offers an explanation for counselors' perception of online chatting as more difficult than calling. The data are in Dutch with English translation. In the Netherlands, information about alcohol and drugs is provided through various media, including several helplines and a national online, text-based service (usually known as a "chat" service) that is accessible through a number of Web sites. These services have the purpose of providing the general population with accurate information about alcohol and drugs. The We thank Trimbos Institute, and particularly Nathalie Dekker, for the collaboration in and commitment to the research project that resulted in, among other things, this article.

This article demonstrates how nicknames that are used by participants in a German forum on eating disorders can be read as identity displays and how they may be related to eating disorders. A qualitative analysis of 83 nicknames of the Hungrig-Online forum reveals that denotational and stereotypical features, along with well-known referents of the names, interdependently characterize participants. Persona attributes such as smallness, weightlessness, childishness, negative self-evaluation, and depression, but also (arguably) self-confidence, are shown to be apparent in the nicknames; many of these attributes can be linked to multifaceted femininity. These findings are then related to general characteristics of eating disorders. In concluding, the far-reaching rules for registration of nicknames in the forum are taken into account and questioned, for it may be that in sensitive online groups, nicknames play an especially important role in identity construction.